Excuse Patterns That Hold You Back
There’s a fine line between reasons and excuses. Reasons lead to action; excuses defend inaction. Here are a few excuse patterns, or saboteurs of action, that we have all likely employed.
“I’M NOT READY ENOUGH YET.”
This excuse is clearly rooted in the fear of failure. If this thought prevents you from acting, ask yourself: What would happen if that were true, and you did the thing anyway? What would the best – and worst-case performance scenarios for you look like? Chances are, the worst case is not as dire as you imagine it to be.
You’ve likely heard motivational speakers admit, “I had no business receiving that task that I was assigned at a very young age, but I figured it out.” They are right. You might not feel you are good enough for something, but when the moment picks you, I can promise that you are more ready than you think. Seize it.
You don’t always have to be perfect for an opportunity. Sometimes all you need is to be good enough or ready enough!
“I NEED MORE INFORMATION.”
Of course, information is crucial for making good decisions. However, it’s easy to get bogged down in analysis and end up with paralysis. More information does not always lead to more clarity or more courage; it can also overwhelm and distract you from the crucial decision at hand. If you find yourself researching to put off acting, it helps to focus on the essential factors of your choice.
What is the decision to be made or the action to be taken, and what single fact does it most rely on? Which information must you know for sure? What information can you do without? How much information is enough? What do your instincts tell you? When is action needed? You only need to do enough research to be informed about the most critical things—the rest is overthinking. Too many filters make weak coffee. Too much overthinking weakens courage.
“I HAVE OTHER PRIORITIES RIGHT NOW.”
This may be genuinely true. But it’s easy to use urgent priorities to put off important actions that are less time-sensitive and more difficult.
I recommend a trick. Any time you are faced with multiple demands on your time, ask, “What is the one thing that I must do now?” And then do not let any other tasks crowd it out. In fact, double down on the one thing above everything else. Then make yourself make progress.
“IT’S NOT THE RIGHT TIME.”
There’s certainly something to be said for getting the timing right. Unfortunately, we’re not particularly good at judging this in the moment. Often, we don’t recognize the perfect moment until it has passed—if there was ever a perfect moment at all. In most situations, conditions will never be perfect, so there’s no use in waiting, but this is all about procrastination. The saying goes “better late than never,” but I sometimes see it as an excuse to settle for later or never. I have an opposite view—in life, it’s usually better to be early than late, and that’s certainly true when it comes to acting.
“I’LL LET SOMEONE ELSE GO FIRST.”
Here’s another indicator of an underlying fear of failure. You want to believe that seeing someone else act first will lower the risk somehow or at least help you feel more confident. It probably won’t. If they fail, you’ll be even more nervous; if they succeed, you’ll compare yourself and wonder if you’ll measure up. And if you let someone else grab the opportunity at hand, it might turn out to be the only one. Then, when others act and succeed or get glory, will you regret that you had it in your hand and let it slip away? If you’re serious about doing something, it makes no sense to put yourself at the back of the line.
“I’M NOT THE RIGHT PERSON TO DO THIS.”
Maybe you feel like it’s not your place. Maybe this action feels too big and daring for you. But who will do it if not you? If you can’t point to a specific person, not just someone who should do it, but who will, the answer is no one. And if you’re utterly convinced that you’re not the right person, your task becomes helping to find the right person and supporting them in doing what needs to be done. Make no mistake, that is an action too.
But again, if you are right there, at the point of action, maybe you are overlooking that you are indeed the right person—the person many, and even you, might have been waiting for. Look no further. Own the moment.
“I’LL TEST THE WATERS BEFORE I DIVE IN.”
Sometimes you know a big action is called for, but it’s too scary, so you take a half-step toward it instead of going all the way. It seems like a safer bet to do this, but it often proves ineffective. That’s because the relationship between effort and results is highly correlated. And when the bare minimum is all you do, you don’t see the results. Then you feel discouraged, so you end up abandoning the idea altogether—not realizing that you could have gotten the results you hoped for if you had given it your all in the first place.
Go all in if action is needed. Quit hedging, diluting, or watering down the impact you want to make. Don’t get stuck in a self-fulfilling prophecy – a vicious cycle of poor execution that yields no results – and then respond to the bad results with a new narrative to excuse your insufficient action.
“I AM ONLY ONE PERSON.”
“There is only so much I can do alone,” the excuse goes on to say. Thank goodness the folk heroes in history did not all feel this way, or we would still be stuck somewhere back there. Movements grow and are often inspired by one person or a single action. Don’t see yourself as the only person who carries the weight of action, but as someone who can be an inspiration to others.
Courage is contagious. It begins close in: one honest conversation, one boundary kept, one person who refuses to look away. You are not responsible for everything, only for the next brave step that is yours to take. Take it, and you will quietly give others permission to take theirs. That is how “only one” becomes many—and how change, the kind that lasts, happens.
To conclude
As I said before, all these excuses can sometimes be legitimate reasons. The key difference is what you do as a result. When it’s an excuse, you absolve yourself, stay paralyzed, and do nothing. When it’s a reason, you look for ways to resolve that reason – you identify new, intermediate actions to take now that will move you toward the bigger action in a concrete way. Don’t allow these “reasons” to sabotage your actions and stop you in your tracks.
Don’t become an excuse machine and refine the habit of always defending inaction, looking for somewhere external to lay blame, making it others’ problem, and absolving yourself of responsibility. Here, there is no learning and no resolve to improve: “I did fine; it was their fault, the rain’s fault, my malfunctioning clock’s fault.”
An alternative approach could be more constructive, focused on understanding what happened, what could have happened differently, and most importantly, how you must act in the future to achieve a more successful outcome. I find it helpful to test my “reasons” against the common excuses. While these can sometimes be legitimate reasons, often, they’re signs of fear at work.
